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Fun and effective! The Starting Hurdle measures your height and distance. It even motivates the work you do on land to improve your vertical jump and teaches you the movements of the most effective racing start.

Just $429

The STARTING HURDLE -- Measures height and distance and is a blast to use!

Designed by Coach John Salvino with help from Tropical Penguin, this cool in-water start device is inexpensive at $429 ($399 each if you get six lanes). It measures both the height and the distance of each start. That makes it a ton of fun. Just make sure a coach is always directing the starts and the traffic or your swimmers can break their necks and die. So, it’s serious fun under a professional coach’s supervision. Immediately the starts get better and the old pole which caused a parabola start is dispensed with as swimmers learn the athletic maneuvers of a perfect racing start.

For coaches:

•Use the Start maker to motivate the work you do to improve vertical jump, such as our Leaper or Mini Leaper using isokinetics. This device is for use at any age, but at all ages you must supervise. Enforce strong rules about waiting until all swimmers in a lane have completed their starts to swim back to the wall, for example. Or put a Start maker in ever other lane to give a lane to swim back.

•That said, you can practice dozens of starts in a short period of time, since most of the athletic movements are “learned kinesthetically. The theory and function of starts is less important than experimenting until the hands, then head, then the hips, then the feet clear the height and then the reach of the start.